A Theoretical Pathway to Contemporary Islam

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which modernity was theorized in relation to Islam to analyse the historical contingency of knowledge production on Islam in Western scholarship. It critically interrogates concepts such as history, civilization, and modernity, in which Islam transitions from a timeless other to a distinctive trajectory within multiple modernities. The chapter proposes Paul Rabinow’s framework of the contemporary to open up non-Orientalist and non-binary approaches to the study of Islam. Overall, the chapter stresses three theoretical propositions: a historical approach to epistemology and analytical tools; the need to recognize Muslims as active agents shaping discourses of Islam; and finally, a conceptual openness to emergent phenomena and interrelations between the traditional and the modern.